The international scientific community continues to publish reports highlighting the risks to which we are exposing the Earth, our home: Emissions of greenhouse gases change the climate because of their potential for global warming (Global Warming Potential, GWP); industrial pollution, urban, agricultural, military, is responsible for chemical contamination and that particulate pollution and poison food, air and water, the relationship is unstable resources / waste, with the gradual reduction of the first increase of the latter; regarding the world’s energy needs, nuclear and environmentally sustainable alternative sources cannot replace fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal). But in an analysis on the future of our planet, the element that creates the greatest alarm is the relentless population growth. From 10 million people in the Neolithic period, has reached one billion in 1800. Over the past 100 years, the population is from 1.6 at 6 billion and growing by 80 million every year. It is particularly the developing countries to experience a veritable explosion of population, with high birth rates and declining mortality as a result of improved health. In 2050, the global population could double, reaching 10-12 billion. Today, nearly 40% of people are younger than 20 years, and of these, 85% live in developing countries. Work is hard, they lack the resources, there is no access to education. Its “population growth in the poorest world’s could be the cause of civil conflict and terrorism” (Population Institute). A future, therefore, is very complex. Politicians worldwide are called to one of the most difficult challenges in the human history . At the Copenhagen summit on the climate change, there was talk of climate and environment, but also population control as a solution to the problems of the planet. Cynically, it was even hinted at as a family planning and birth control can be considered a “primary tool in the best strategy for reducing carbon emissions.” It should however be pointed out that 50% of emissions of carbon dioxide is the work of half a billion richest people in the world, who populate the area in which growth is zero, whereas the birth rate decreases in proportion to the level of education and the participation of women in society, as happens in the Western industrialized countries that continue to ravage the developing countries, and that the income of the 500 richest people exceeds that of the 416 million poorest. It appears therefore that as long as we fail to redistribute wealth and prosperity more fairly, we cannot avoid that only 1 million of those 416 is organized to revolt against the system. And unless that humanity is not so foolish as to re-elect an elite determined to remove those “inferior” in modern gas chambers, the society of the industrialized countries will never be the same. The Oliver Curry professor, evolution theorist at the London School of Economics, suggests a strict division of humanity into two future races, distinguished by detailed genetic and physical characteristics (based on a genetic superiority and an underclass that keeps the lower ‘ruling elite). Impressive results, the analogy with “The man who lived in the future,” a science fiction film of 1960 based on the novel by H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine “(1895). In the story the protagonist is a journey into the future world destroyed by war with men living in idleness and without any feelings surface and a subterranean people of men and deformed cannibals. On his return he chooses only three books of history and human culture (intentionally not specified) and returns in the future for groped to develop a new civilization based on different rules. I wonder if the human race will ever really have this option.
Translated by Martina Delser
